Suspicions your flatmate had abandoned their dirty dishes in the sink for you to clean have been debunked, after a stunning 11th-hour revelation they were ‘just soaking.’

After 113 hours of submersion in stagnating, room-temperature water, it was widely accepted that your flatmate’s dishes had simply been left there permanently, and quite possibly on purpose by a man without shame or dignity.

The festering kitchenware, consisting of one instant noodle-encrusted pan, a plate coated with rubberized scrambled-egg residue, several items of cutlery and a bowl whose foul former contents cutting-edge scientific methods could not accurately identify, were first discovered on Thursday fucking afternoon, for fucks sake, and now it’s fucking Monday.

After a protracted back-channel dialogue between concerned member states, it was decided that, by virtue of you apparently being the only who gives a fuck, it would fall to you to deal unilaterally with the ongoing environmental disaster that is your kitchen aka the supposedly sanitary place where you actually prepare food.

But at the eleventh hour, it your flatmate, in a hastily-announced press conference by the fridge, insisted that you ‘don’t worry about those’, they were ‘actually just about to do them’ and that he had simply been, in fact, ‘leaving them to soak’, soak, that is, for the entire weekend when he’s been at his girlfriend’s house or who the fuck knows where.

Soaking is a process whereby dishes are left for days, weeks or years in order to just somehow self-clean by magic or whatever. At first, the warm water and detergent work to loosen contaminants adhering to the surface. However, in the longer term, other forces contribute:

• different strains of bacteria evolving until they develop weapons so powerful they render the entire sink area uninhabitable to carbon-based life, sterilising the surface;
• tectonic subduction eventually dragging the entire area deep beneath the earth’s crust, incinerating all remaining proteins;
• quantum theory suggests that over an infinite time span all matter will eventually transform into every other possible kind of matter, turning the dishes into new dishes, or self-cleaning dishes or a small howler monkey named ‘Uh’tatum’ that sings the softly maddening songs of the dead.

Although the official statement was brief, sources close to your flatmate suggest he ‘gets it’ but ‘can’t see why it’s SUCH a big deal’ and ‘you should have just said something if it was bothering you that much.’